Saturday, August 29, 2015
Cuteness Overload.
I don't know if the show is going to be any good, but this pic is fantastic. Via dean trippe | moonbase one (“Just green light season two already.” - jasonhorn):
Science Often Isn't.
Study Finds: Studies Are Wrong - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "One of the bedrock assumptions of science is that for a study's results to be valid, other researchers should be able to reproduce the study and reach the same conclusions. The ability to successfully reproduce a study and find the same results is, as much as anything, how we know that its findings are true, rather than a one-off result...
That's why efforts like the Reproducibility Project, which attempted to retest findings from 100 studies in three top-tier psychology journals, are so important. As it turns out, findings from the majority of the studies the project attempted to redo could not be reproduced. The New York Times reports on the new study's findings:
Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction."
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Wendler Gets It.
The Blowhard Test – Are you a Blowhard? - JimWendler.com: "Are you a blowhard or not? Take this test and see where you rank:
Are you full of shit?
Butt into the private lives of others?
Comment on stuff you have no experience on?
Give opinion even when not asked?
Make yourself to be much more important than you seem?
Do you brag about your (non) achievements?
Do you identify with Dr. Phil, Oprah, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Rosie O’Donnell, Rush Limbaugh, Tim Ferris, everyone involved at 24 hour new stations and sports talk radio hosts.
Do you post on the internet under a different name for fear of being held to your word?
Did any of the above make you upset and want to lash out on social media?"
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Department of Homeland Security raids offices of male escort website. Homeland secured!
Mission creep, bureaucratic nonsense, puritanical holdover 'morality', bad incentives, etc, etc. The usual. Via The Washington Post and 6 Thoughts on the Rentboy.com Bust from 1 Angry, Gay Libertarian - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "As usual, follow the money. Want to know the real reason why DHS is involved? Want to know why it took the government decades to go after a site titled "Rentboy.com"? It's on page three of the complaint against Rentboy. Between 2010 and 2015 the site had more than $10 million in gross proceeds. The feds are looking to seize $1.4 million from six bank accounts related to the raid. This money, thanks to federal asset forfeiture rules, would likely be split among the agencies involved, including the New York Police Department, who offered up their assistance in the raid even though there was probably no need for both agencies."We're all getting fatter.
The average American woman now weighs as much as the average 1960s man - The Washington Post: "The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As reddit recently pointed out, that's almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.
Men, you're not looking too hot in this scenario either. Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. Doing the same comparison as above, today's American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s. At 195.5 pounds, put five American guys in a room and you've gathered roughly half a ton of manhood."
It wasn't a "slap in the face." It was the cake down your piehole.
And if I hear one more time online about Marilyn Monroe was a size 12-16 [and she wasn't] from someone who can't own their own choices, I swear to god... The absurdity of women’s clothing sizes, in one chart - The Washington Post: "Here are some numbers that illustrate the insanity of women's clothing sizes: A size 8 dress today is nearly the equivalent of a size 16 dress in 1958. And a size 8 dress of 1958 doesn't even have a modern-day equivalent — the waist and bust measurements of a Mad Men-era 8 come in smaller than today's size 00...
Enter the era of vanity sizing. Clothing manufacturers realized that they could flatter consumers by revising sizes downward. The measurements that added up to a size 12 in 1958 would get redefined to a size 6 by 2011. And different manufacturers defined sizes differently, too — this fascinating New York Times graphic from 2011 shows how a size 8 waist measurement could differ by as much as five inches of cloth between different designers."
Vanity Sizing - Different Sizes in Stores: "Some time in the past several decades, designers tapped into a bankable truth: Women tend to feel better and buy more when we fit into a smaller size. "I put on 10 pounds in college and dreaded shopping because buying bigger sizes forced me to admit I'd gained weight," says Naomi,* 25, from Montreal, Canada. "It was like a slap in the face."
...Enter vanity sizing, where designers add extra inches of fabric to clothing without changing the number on the tag. For example, if you measure a size 2 pair of pants today, they might be as wide around the waist and hips as a 4 from 10 years ago. And 00s aren't the result of women shrinking away (though some actresses seem to be). Designers created them because as 4s morphed into 2s and 2s became 0s, smaller-framed women were sized out of the normal range."
"The last year in the U.S. that more men than women graduated from college was 1981."
Tell me more of this patriarchy. A new book answers why it’s so hard for educated women to find dates - The Washington Post: "The last year in the U.S. that more men than women graduated from college was 1981. Since then, the college gender gap has been getting wider every year. In 2012, there were 34 percent more women than men who graduated from college. By 2023, that gap is expected to reach 47 percent."
"...in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities... reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs."
You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much - The New Yorker: "What counts as work, in the skilled trades, has some intrinsic limits; once a house or bridge is built, that’s the end of it. But in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities—that is, reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs. Consider the litigation system, in which the hours worked by lawyers at large law firms are a common complaint. If dispute resolution is the social function of the law, what we have is far from the most efficient way to reach fair or reasonable resolutions. Instead, modern litigation can be understood as a massive, socially unnecessary arms race, wherein lawyers subject each other to torturous amounts of labor just because they can. In older times, the limits of technology and a kind of professionalism created a natural limit to such arms races, but today neither side can stand down, lest it put itself at a competitive disadvantage."
Moreover, our many improvements in the technologies of productivity make the arms-race problem worse. The fact that employees are now always reachable eliminates what was once a natural barrier of sorts, the idea that work was something that happened during office hours or at the physical office. With no limits, work becomes like a football game where the whistle is never blown."
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
"Life is guarded by time... every day we are presented with choices."
"No matter what path you take in life, there will always be those who hunger to see you fail... but it's up to you to find the motivation through adversity."
"In each one of us there's always an internal voice questioning the decisions we've made. But dwelling on the past only allows mistakes free reign in your head. For you're not defined by your past experiences, merely guided by them... Success is a mentality."
Idiots for Jesus.
Remember when college was for expanding your horizons? Learning new things? Challenging your preconceptions or even forcing yourself to analyze ideas strange to you that you could accept or reject on their own merits? Yeah, that was nice. Imagine what's going to happen when they meet - gasp! - actual gay people.
Summer reading assignment causes controversy, boycott at Duke | USA TODAY College: "Incoming freshmen at Duke University are reportedly refusing to read their summer novel, Fun Home — an LGBT, graphic novel by Alison Bechdel — due to their alleged Christian and moral beliefs.
According to the Duke Chronicle, freshman Brian Grasso posted in the Class of 2019 Facebook page that he would not read the book “because of the graphic visual depictions of sexuality.”
“I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it,” Grasso added.
Many other students shared Grasso’s beliefs, saying that they were against reading the novel which details Bechdel’s tumultuous relationship with her father, a closeted gay man, while coming to terms with her own sexuality."
Monday, August 24, 2015
"...the part of your consciousness that you use to separate rational from irrational can be stuck in an irrational loop, and it can be a real challenge to break out of it."
WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR — : "The thing is, reflecting on mistakes is a great way to learn from them, and grow as a person. The trick is to recognize when that reflection stops being useful and becomes self-destructive. That’s not always easy, because the part of your consciousness that you use to separate rational from irrational can be stuck in an irrational loop, and it can be a real challenge to break out of it.
Look: we all mess up. We all do things we regret. We all hurt people when we don’t mean to, and we all hurt ourselves (or allow ourselves to be hurt) when we wish we would have protected ourselves. The difference between Good People and Bad People is reflecting on those times, making amends when necessary, and doing our best not to mess up next time."
